The teams that participated in the BCS were drawn from the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS; formerly known as Division I-A) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and were determined by a ranking system that consisted of three equally weighted components: the USA Today Coaches’ Poll, the Harris Interactive College Football Poll, and an average of six computer rankings. The two teams that topped the rankings at the end of the regular season met in the BCS National Championship Game, which rotated its location between the sites of the four bowls and took place a few days after the bowl game that is traditionally held at that site. The 10 BCS participants were selected by the individual bowl committees from a pool that consisted of the automatically qualifying champions of the six “major conferences” (the American Athletic, Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big Ten, Pacific-12, and Southeastern conferences) and four at-large teams. There was also a stipulation that awards automatic BCS berths—at the expense of major conference at-large selections—to members of the five other conferences in the FBS if they were among the top 12 teams in the final BCS rankings. Moreover, by special arrangement, if the University of Notre Dame, a traditional football power that has no conference affiliation, was among the top eight teams in the final BCS rankings, it too received an automatic berth.

The BCS was the first true postseason football championship arrangement in the history of the NCAA’s highest division. Since the 1970s the NCAA’s lower divisions—the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA), Division II, and Division III—and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) have determined their national champions through single-elimination tournaments with fields ranging from 16 to 32 teams. Before the advent of the BCS, the title of Division I-A “national champion” was bestowed on the team (or teams) that ended the season atop one of the polls taken of a fixed pool of coaches or sportswriters. Conventionally, the teams ranked first in the Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI), and coaches’ polls were given the greatest claim to the title, but various other polls also named national champions throughout the years. As a result, many seasons ended with split national champions. Because of contractual obligations between bowl games and conferences, postseason matchups between the two consensus top-ranked teams occurred in only 8 of the 57 seasons between 1936 (the first year of the AP poll) and 1992.

Precursors to the BCS were established in 1992 and 1995. The 1992 arrangement, known as the Bowl Coalition, instituted a selection process for four bowl games—the Cotton, Fiesta, Orange, and Sugar bowls—from among Atlantic Coast, Big East (precursor of the American Athletic Conference), Big 8 (precursor of the Big 12), Southeastern, and Southwest conferences, as well as Notre Dame, that eliminated some conference-bowl affiliations in an attempt to facilitate more prestigious postseason matchups. The effectiveness of the Bowl Coalition was limited, however—first and foremost by exclusion of the Big Ten and Pacific-10 (precursor of the Pacific-12) champions, which remained obligated to the Rose Bowl, but also by conference-bowl obligations that provided finite opportunities for matchups between the two top-ranked teams. This structure produced two de facto national championship games in the Bowl Coalition’s three years of existence, but another arrangement—the Bowl Alliance, instituted in 1995—eliminated all bowl affiliations for the five participating conferences and for Notre Dame and removed the Cotton Bowl from the scheme (because of the planned dissolution in 1996 of the Southwest Conference, to which the bowl had long been tied). The new agreement produced a matchup between the two top-ranked teams in its first year, but the continued absence of the Big Ten and Pacific-10 conferences from the Bowl Alliance prevented true number one versus number two pairings in the next two seasons. These two conferences (along with the Rose Bowl) joined with the Bowl Alliance institutions and bowls in 1998 to form the BCS. Through the first eight years of the BCS, each bowl game hosted the national championship game every fourth year, but in 2006 an additional stand-alone championship game was created.

While the BCS and its forerunners produced matchups of the two top-ranked teams in the coaches’ poll in 10 of the first 16 years of the system, the arrangements were not without controversy. In 2003, because of its relatively low computer rankings, the University of Southern California was not selected to play in the national championship game despite having ended the regular season atop both the AP and coaches’ polls. This resulted in the only split championship in the BCS era and led to the replacement of the AP poll by the Harris poll in the BCS formula.

From its creation in 1998, the BCS came under increasing criticism from fans and media who agitated for a play-off system that would provide a clear-cut national champion. The bowl committees and many conference administrators resisted change, arguing that the BCS be kept principally because of the long-standing bowl tradition (more than 30 games played from just before Christmas to just after New Year’s Day, usually in warm locales, attracting hundreds of thousands of vacationing fans) and because the lack of a play-off increased the importance of college football’s regular season. Often unspoken was the great financial windfall provided by the bowls, which was occasionally supplemented by illegal bribes and other improprieties among bowl officials and local politicians, most notably in the case of an expenditure scandal that led to the firing of the Fiesta Bowl’s CEO in 2011. However, public desire for a play-off—as well as criticism of the bowl system’s corruption—grew so pronounced that a committee of university presidents replaced the BCS with a four-team College Football Playoff in 2014 in an attempt to crown more-definitive national champions.

A list of FBS college football national champions is provided in the table.

College football national champions*

season

champion

*National champion determined by various polls until the introduction of the BCS system in 1998; BCS system replaced with the College Football Playoff system in 2014–15.

**Southern California won the BCS championship but had its title stripped in 2011 because of rules violations committed during the 2004 and 2005 seasons.